Intention structure and extended responses in a portable natural language interface

Abstract

This paper describes discourse processing inKingKong, a portable natural language interface.KingKong enables users to pose questions and issue commands to a back end system. The notion of a discourse is central toKingKong, and underlies much of the intelligent assistance thatkong provides to its users.kong's approach to modeling discourse is based on the work of Grosz and Sidner (1986). We extend Grosz and Sidner's framework in several ways, principally to allow multiple independent discourse contexts to remain active at the same time. This paper also describesKingKong's method of intention recognition, which is similar to that described in Kautz and Allen (1986) and Carberry (1988). We demonstrate that a relatively simple intention recognition component can be exploited by many other discourserelated mechanisms, for example to disambiguate input and resolve anaphora. In particular, this paper describes in detail the mechanism inKingKong that uses information from the discourse model to form a range of cooperative extended responses to queries in an effort to aid the user in accomplishing her goals.